About this Collection

This collection offers access to the four Walt Whitman notebooks and his cardboard butterfly that were among 10 notebooks which went missing from the Library of Congress after a 1942 wartime evacuation of treasures. The five items were returned on February 24, 1995, leaving six notebooks remain missing.

The Thomas B. Harned collection of the Walt Whitman papers spans the period 1842 to 1937, with most of the items dated from 1855 to 1892. Harned, an attorney and one of Whitman’s three literary executors, donated it in 1918. The collection later became a magnet for other major Whitman donations much larger than the Harned/Whitman collection. The whole collection consists of correspondence, poetry and prose manuscripts, notes and notebooks, proofs and offprints, printed matter, and miscellaneous items.

About Whitman's Notebooks

Thomas Harned donated to the Library of Congress a total of forty original Walt Whitman notebooks. There are others in the Feinberg-Whitman collection in the Library of Congress and several each in collections at Duke University, Yale University, New York Public Library, and other public repositories, as well as some which are still in private hands. It is safe to estimate that Whitman created at least one hundred notebooks of greatly varying sizes and descriptions. Some are basically commercial notebooks in which he wrote with any implement at hand (pencil stub, pen, crayon) and which he amended at will by cutting out and replacing pages and pasting in clippings, photographs or scraps of manuscripts. Others are home-made notebooks which he created by folding and/or cutting sheets of paper and fastening with a pin or ribbon. A few come down to us as loose sheets.

In these typical writer's notebooks, Whitman jotted down thoughts in prose and expressions in poetry. The earliest examples include journalistic entries with ideas for articles he might write. His first trial lines for what would soon become part of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass appear in an early notebook (LC #80) which bears an internal date of 1847; it was his habit, however, to use these notebooks over a number of years, filling in blank pages at will, and the remarkable trial flights of verse for "Song of Myself" in it are likely to date closer to 1854.

In the Civil War years, he was more apt to carry tiny notebooks in his shirt pocket in which he took notes about the needs and wants of wounded soldiers whom he visited and comforted in the hospitals in and near Washington, D.C. In these he noted what treats a soldier might like on the next visit — raspberry syrup, rice-pudding, notepaper and pencil — or notes and addresses of family to whom Whitman would then write in place of the gravely wounded or dead young man. Occasionally he would also describe scenes on the battle-field, probably from reports from others in the camps.

In later years, he used the notebooks for literary lecture notes, drafts of poems, and recording of national events, such as how New York City looked the day after Lincoln's assassination. Many notebooks have become known by their very partial contents, when in reality each book is apt to cover many subjects. The wide range of topics in the other notebooks demonstrate the great diversity of subjects included in the poet's reading and range of interests: English history and literature; Lucretius, Shakespeare and Spanish literary masterpieces; physique and the science of swimming; faith, death and organized religion; the Presbyterian Church in Jamaica, Long Island; oratory and lecturing; his 1869 trip to Boston; notes on Columbus and on Lincoln; slavery, democracy and the meaning of America. Whitman cut out many pages of these notebooks which apparently had been used earlier for more mundane purposes, such as accounting. In re-sewing the books to incorporate some loose pages, the Library's conservator kept the stubs of the cut pages intact. Thus, such missing pages are included in the numbering but bear no text.

Notebooks Lost in 1942 and Found in 1995

Of the notebooks missing from the Harned collection, the ones returned in 1995 are Library of Congress catalog number 80, 86, 94, and 101, and the cardboard butterfly is number 220. In the Library of Congress illustrated 1954 pamphlet, "Ten Notebooks and a Cardboard Butterfly Missing from the Walt Whitman Papers of the Library of Congress," they are numbered 1, 2, 5, 7, and 11. Most of their content was published, based on research done before their disappearance from the Library, in the following: Emory Holloway, The Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman(1921); Clifton Joseph Furness, Walt Whitman's Workshop (1928); and Charles I. Glicksberg, Walt Whitman and the Civil War (1933). The fullest edition of their texts may be found in Walt Whitman: Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, ed. Edward F. Grier (New York University Press, 1984), in volumes 1 and 2 of 6 vols.